Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice recently launched the second edition of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review during an event on Capitol Hill hosted by Senators Todd Young and John Hickenlooper. SETR scholars Fei-Fei Li, Allison Okamura, Mark Horowitz, Herb Lin, and Amy Zegart described issues surrounding the technologies of the future, especially artificial intelligence (AI). Here are brief excerpts from that discussion.
Condoleezza Rice: We have a particular challenge: at a time when frontier technologies are challenging every aspect of life, I think most of us would say that running fast and running hard in these technologies is our best way to assure our economic and national security. We’ve gone to people who are in the labs, at the bench, doing the leading-edge work in these technologies. The Stanford Emerging Technology Review puts science and technology forward—in other words, it stresses the need to understand the technologies before we begin to think about what policies we need.
Senators, how do you think about the world that we find ourselves in with these emerging, transformative technologies? And how do you think about the role of Congress?
Senator Todd Young: Congratulations to Stanford for producing this year’s updated version of the Emerging Technology Review. The convergence between geopolitics and technology has always been important. In fact, one can trace GDP and geopolitical power to outcompeting adversaries, outcompeting other nations, first to technological innovation and then to adoption. We don’t talk as much about the latter, but I think increasingly that’s something we need to discuss here on the Hill: how we can de-risk and encourage more adoption of these technologies.
We need to continue to nurture our ecosystem. I think of artificial intelligence, so central already to our way of life, which I believe will find its way into seemingly every facet of our life and every area of our economy in fairly short order.
We have the world’s broadest, deepest capital markets. We have an amazing system of education, particularly higher education. We have some of the world’s best startup companies and big tech companies. But we can’t take these advantages for granted. In fact, now, because of the brute-force economics of our adversaries, we need to figure out how to optimize our system and account for its shortcomings, too.
I’m chairing a National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology right now. Soon we’ll produce our final report, where we will emphasize that the United States is about to be passed up by the Chinese because they have recognized the importance of bioindustrial applications to biotech. I think most of the changes we need to make will be regulatory in nature, along with enabling more biomanufacturing in this country.
Another area where I’ve been active is semiconductors. I think Congress has done quite well in showing leadership and being attentive to our semiconductor needs.
That, I think, establishes a decent model for other technologies where we need to increase our resilience and bake a national security premium into some of the things we buy. Congress has a very active role to play. Congress needs to realize that in each of these and many other tech areas, we need upstream investment in research. We don’t need to be cutting research right now. We need to be planting more seed corn for innovation and growth.
Senator John Hickenlooper: I’m old enough to remember Sputnik, when the Russians launched something into space and we weren’t even close—we weren’t even thinking about it. And yet this country came together—the business community, government, our research capabilities—and in five years we had two million people working on getting someone into space, and then to the moon. I think we have a Sputnik moment right now. We should be ramping up investments to make sure that we get more kids in sixth grade, seventh grade, and eighth grade excited about space and science and technology and what that’s going to look like. The level of urgency that this country should feel isn’t quite there.
So much is happening—it is the most amazing time. Sometimes I see people get depressed because they feel that the change is happening so fast and they’re losing control. This is when we have to redouble our optimism and our efforts to make sure that we don’t let that happen.
Condoleezza Rice: I’m very glad to say that a couple of years ago, I think there wasn’t as much attention here on Capitol Hill. Now we have a cohort of senators and Congress people who care about these issues because they are interwoven with education, as you’ve mentioned, Senator Hickenlooper. They’re woven into issues of our economic growth and national security.
I agree with you about going all the way back to The Endless Frontier. Universities have been core to our innovation ecosystem. After World War II, Vannevar Bush came up with an absolutely brilliant idea: you could leverage universities, with their students and faculty, and the federal government would fund the very best ideas at the fundamental research level. Some of them would never pan out. But an awful lot of them would lead to innovation and breakthroughs, and some of them would lead to the founding of whole new industries. And I think the federal government has gotten the payback it was looking for.
Amy Zegart: I have the great pleasure of being the co-chair of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, along with Condi Rice and our dean of engineering, Jennifer Widom. We have a hundred faculty across forty different departments and institutes in engineering, social science, and policy working together in a multidisciplinary team to better understand what’s happening in our labs—and what’s happening in our companies—at the speed of relevance.
What are the policy implications? And how can we better inform policy makers in Washington, in states, and in the private sector about these technologies—what’s hype, what’s not, what’s next—and in a way that can help policy makers make better decisions?
This is our second flagship report, and we encourage you to read it. There’s a lot more to come. I know that in Washington, people always ask, “What’s your ask?” Here’s our ask: how can we help? How can we help you better understand what’s happening so you can make better policies that anticipate the opportunities, not just the risks? I’ll start by asking Fei-Fei Li and Mark Horowitz to put some recent events into perspective.
Fei-Fei Li: There is a lot of news about AI, and a lot of progress in AI. I was at the Paris AI Summit, where I shared with the audience that AI is, in my opinion, a civilizational technology because it’s the new compute. Wherever there’s a chip, whether it’s as small as a light bulb or as big as an airplane, there is compute. Compute takes data and then turns it into insight, information, decision, and action. And AI is the new language of compute.
It will prevail across all industries—health care, education, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, everything. And what is really exciting is that in the past few years, especially with the large language models, this is the coming of age of a technology more than half a century old that is reaching the hands of consumers and industry.
There has been a debate about whether we should have open source models, especially critical models, while a lot of companies have taken the approach of closed models. For good reason: the commercial world is competitive, and having good closed source models is important for business. DeepSeek is an open source model coming from outside the United States. We have open source models from Europe as well.
We speak of a global moment—of how incredibly competitive as well as exciting this technology is. It cuts across borders. And it reminds us of not only the commercial but also the geopolitical issues.
Mark Horowitz: One of the things about emerging technologies is there are often many hurdles before they get to be really useful. Quantum computing has enormous promise, but manufacturing such computers and making them useful is a very difficult task. There are many possible base technologies in which to build them. There are neutral atoms, sometimes called code atoms, there’s superconducting, there are trapped ions, and then there’s another group trying to do photonic quantum computing. Topological qubits are yet another way of doing it. It’s not clear which of those base technologies is going to be the most successful.
Microsoft did just announce a major advance, but it still has to demonstrate reliability and the other parts of engineering. We need to be careful about taking a scientific advance in one step and extrapolating to where it’s going, because oftentimes there are other hurdles.
Amy Zegart: Let’s not forget the innovation model from the 1940s that made the United States an innovation superpower. Decades of academic research funded by the federal government, then giving rise to commercial investment and innovation in the private sector. Allison, you’re involved in really interesting robotics projects at the forefront of your field. Can you give us a sense of what is this thing called fundamental research?
How does federal funding work in your life?
Allison Okamura: A lot of the work we do is in the field of medical robotics. We have funding from a combination of sources—a little bit from industry—but often that funding is very short term. It lasts maybe one year. And as soon as you get such a grant, you’re thinking about where the next year of funding will come from.
That is a big challenge. So, what faculty at institutions like Stanford and around the world do is gather interdisciplinary expertise, which you can do across universities and across departments and schools, so that you can bring people in different fields together in ways that might be very hard to do at companies or in other environments. And it takes this interdisciplinary expertise that you can find within universities to do longer-term work.
We’re not going to have a commercial product within four years, but we are planting these seeds Dr. Zegart referred to that are creating innovative solutions to these kinds of problems, so that further on down the line we have outcomes that will get commercialized and used by people. We have to take risks and invest in creative ideas, and those are things that academics can do. And eventually, even if only a small percentage of the ideas come to fruition, that original funding can help.
Amy Zegart: One of the key points in this report—Herb Lin wrote this section—was that you can’t look at individual technologies in isolation. We have to think about how they fit together. This is a moment of convergence. There are approaches to technological innovation we need to understand across these technologies.
Herbert Lin: As we look at the different emerging technologies in the report, one of the most striking things is how they all interact with each other. For example, if you look at energy technologies, AI is important. Materials science is important; space technologies feed that. If you look at robotics—we just heard about how different technologies and scientific expertise play into that. So, the idea that you can focus on one area and say, “this is the important area,” and neglect the rest, is not a way to win any kind of race.
A second thing we looked at was how to sustain innovation across all of these fields. Overwhelmingly, what emerges from talking to our faculty and others is the importance of talent. Talent can’t be produced on demand. It takes a long time to develop talent for the United States. On the domestic side, we have STEM education that doesn’t do a great job of producing people capable of advancing the frontiers in the future. And in terms of foreign talent, we make a practice of importing graduate students from all over the world and when they get their PhDs, we kick them out. We go out of our way to kick them out. They want to stay.
Amy Zegart: One of the myths of innovation is that the world’s best talent will always come here. But they have options. We shouldn’t assume we’re always going to get the world’s best.
Herbert Lin: I did want to add one thing. Drew Endy is the creator of the biology content of the report, where the argument is that the promise of biology is sort of where semiconductors were in 1960 or so. So, you can imagine that there’s a huge opportunity to be exploited in biology, synthetic biology, and biotechnology—but only if we take advantage of it. The Chinese are making that bet, investing huge amounts in biotechnology. Our investments pale in comparison.
There are many studies that suggest that over 50 percent of GDP could be affected by biotechnology. This is a big deal, but it’s aspirational. That is, we could get there—but if we blow it, we won’t.
